BlizzardPedia:About
Irvine, CA, U.S. Vélizy, Yvelines, France | industry = Computer and video game industry | revenue = $1.5 Billion | num_employees = More than Source: (Blizzard's president interview| key_people = Michael Morhaime (president and co-founder) Rob Pardo (vice president) Shane Dabiri (producer on World of Warcraft) Jeffrey Kaplan (lead designer on World of Warcraft) | products = The Warcraft series The StarCraft series The Diablo series (full list in article) | homepage = www.blizzard.com | }} Blizzard Entertainment is an American based computer game developer and publisher. Since its release of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994 it has been one of the most successful game development studios in the world. Its headquarters are based in Irvine, California. The company has a history of largely overshooting release dates to ensure the quality of their games. Many Blizzard fans see this as somewhat of a blessing in disguise , as Blizzard has a reputation for producing classic games that are played for years after their release. All of their computer games since Warcraft: Orcs & Humans have been best-sellers. History Blizzard Entertainment was founded in February, 1991 as Silicon & Synapse by Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce. The company developed games like Rock & Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings (published by Interplay Productions). In 1994, the company briefly changed its name to Chaos Studios, before finally settling on Blizzard Entertainment after it was discovered that another company with the Chaos name already existed. That same year, they were acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates for under $10 million. Shortly thereafter, Blizzard shipped their breakthrough hit Warcraft. Blizzard has changed hands several times since then: Davidson was acquired by Sierra On-line which was then acquired by a trademark/marketing/franchise which included timeshares, company called CUC International in 1996; CUC then merged with a hotel, real-estate, and car-rental franchiser called HFS Corporation to form Cendant in 1997. In 1998 it became apparent that CUC had engaged in accounting fraud for years before the merger; Cendant's stock lost 80% of its value over the next six months in the ensuing widely discussed accounting scandal. The company sold its consumer software operations, Sierra On-line which included Blizzard, to French publisher Havas in 1998, the same year Havas was purchased by Vivendi. Blizzard is now part of the Vivendi Games group of Vivendi. In 1996, Blizzard acquired Condor Games, which had been working on the game Diablo for Blizzard at the time. Condor was renamed Blizzard North, and has since developed hit games Diablo, Diablo II, and its expansion pack Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. Blizzard North was located in San Mateo, California. Blizzard launched their online gaming service Battle.net in January of 1997 with the release of their action-RPG Diablo. In 2004, Blizzard opened European offices near Paris, France, responsible for the European in-game support of World of Warcraft. On November 23, 2004, Blizzard released World of Warcraft, its MMORPG offering. On May 16, 2005, Blizzard announced the acquisition of Swingin' Ape Studios, a console game developer which had been developing StarCraft: Ghost. The team was renamed Blizzard Console and is now focusing on next generation consoles, after StarCraft: Ghost was 'postponed indefinitely'. On August 1, 2005, Blizzard announced the consolidation of Blizzard North into the headquarters in Irvine, California. Titles * The Lord of the Rings (1991) (Amiga port) - Computer role-playing game * Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess (1991) (Amiga port) - Xiangqi simulation * The Lost Vikings (1992) - platform game * Rock & Roll Racing (1993) - racing game * Blackthorne (1994) - cinematic platform game * The Death and Return of Superman (1994) - side-scrolling beat 'em up * Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994) - fantasy real-time strategy game * The Lost Vikings II (1995) - platform game * Justice League Task Force (SNES version) (1995) - fighting game * Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) - fantasy real-time strategy game ** Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal (1996) - expansion pack * Diablo (1996) - action-oriented computer role-playing game * StarCraft (1998) - science fiction real-time strategy game ** StarCraft: Brood War (1998) - expansion pack * Diablo II (2000) - action-oriented RPG ** Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (2001) - expansion pack * Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002) - fantasy real-time strategy game ** Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (2003) - expansion pack * World of Warcraft (2004) - MMORPG set in the Warcraft universe ** World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (January 16, 2007) - expansion set for World of Warcraft. * StarCraft II has been officially announced as of May 19, 2007, at the World Wide Invitational in Seoul, South Korea. Notable unreleased titles include Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, which was cancelled on May 22, 1998, Shattered Nations, and StarCraft: Ghost, which was indefinitely postponed on March 24, 2006 and whose current status is in question. Pax Imperia II was originally announced as a title to be published by Blizzard. Blizzard eventually dropped Pax Imperia II, though, when it decided it might be in conflict with their other space strategy project, the now-legendary StarCraft. THQ eventually contracted with Heliotrope and released the game in 1997 as Pax Imperia Eminent Domain. Blizzard Entertainment has announced that they will be producing a Warcraft live-action movie. Former employees Over the years, some former Blizzard employees have moved on and established gaming companies of their own: *Flagship StudiosAbout Flagship Studios, currently working on Hellgate: London and Mythos. *ArenaNetArenaNet, creators of the Guild Wars franchise. *Ready At Dawn StudiosAbout Ready At Dawn Studios, creators of Daxter, currently developing God of War: Chains of Olympus. *Red 5 StudiosRed 5 Studios, currently working on a yet to be announced next-gen MMOG. *Castaway EntertainmentAbout Castaway Entertainment, currently working on a yet to be announced next-gen title. *U.I. Pacific GamesUIPG Company Information, currently working on a PC and Xbox 360 MMOG. *Nethera StudiosNethèra Studios, currently working on a yet to be announced next-gen title. Controversies Battle.net Battle.net is an online gaming service used for its games Diablo, Starcraft, Starcraft: Brood War, Diablo II, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition, Warcraft III, and Warcraft III Expansion Set: The Frozen Throne. It was released in January 1997 coinciding with the release of Diablo. It functions as a way to play over the Internet, featuring cooperative and player-versus-player game playing, a game matchmaking system, and online chat among other features. Battle.net is free, and only requires an Internet connection and account registration in order to use. A group of gamers reverse engineered the network protocol used by Battle.net and Blizzard games, and released a free (under the GNU GPL) Battle.net emulation package called bnetd. With bnetd, a gamer is not required to use the official Battle.net servers to play Blizzard games. In February of 2002, lawyers retained by Blizzard threatened legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against the developers of bnetd. Blizzard games are designed to operate online exclusively with a set of Blizzard-controlled servers collectively known as "Battle.net". Battle.net servers include a CD key check as a means of preventing software piracy. Despite offers from the bnetd developers to integrate Blizzard's CD key checking system into bnetd, Blizzard claims that the public availability of any such software package facilitates piracy, and moved to have the bnetd project shut down under provisions of the DMCA. As this case is one of the first major test cases for the DMCA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation became involved, for a while negotiations were ongoing to resolve the case without a trial. The negotiations failed however, and Blizzard won the case on all counts: the defendants were ruled to have breached both StarCraft's End User License Agreement (EULA) and the Terms of Use of Battle.net. This decision was appealed to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which also ruled in favor of Blizzard/Vivendi on September 1, 2005. Warden Client Blizzard has made use of a special form of software known as the 'Warden Client' in order to detect the use of third-party programs used for the purpose of cheating. The Warden client scans the process names, window titles, and a small portion of the code segment of running processes in order to determine whether any of these third-party programs are running. This determination is made by hashing the scanned strings and comparing the hashed value to a list of hashes known to correspond to cheat programs. The Warden client is known to be used with Blizzard's World of Warcraft online game. http://www.rootkit.com/blog.php?newsid=358 The Warden software has run afoul of controversy among some privacy advocates. http://play.tm/story/6837 Since Warden scans running processes other than the World of Warcraft game, and could possibly run across e-mail addresses, instant messenger IDs, and personally identifiable information, privacy advocates and others state that Warden behaves similarly to spyware. However, many World of Warcraft players note that only hashed strings are compared, and no personally identifiable information is transmitted back to Blizzard; moreover, all players consent, via the EULA and terms of use, to the Warden software performing these scans while World of Warcraft is running. http://www.rootkit.com/blog.php?newsid=358 Many issues have been raised regarding Warden. Most notably that it appears that many players are reported as cheating by the program, and subsequently banned, when in fact they are not. Many Linux users were banned after an update to Warden causing it to incorrectly detect Cedega as a cheat program. Among other programs mis-identified as cheating programs are controller mapping programs, macro programs running idle in the system tray, and even some WoW add-ons. These types of wrongful account closures often result in little to no response from the Blizzard admin department because of the reason for which the account was closed. http://www.linuxlookup.com/2006/nov/15/linux_users_banned_from_world_of_warcraft http://www.cedega.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=41042 * World of Warcraft Terms of Use (See section 14.A) The Warden is not the first time Blizzard Entertainment has attempted to look at their customer's computers. In 1998 Blizzard Entertainment had a class action lawsuit filed against them for "unlawful business practices" for the action of collecting data from a user's computer without their permission. http://attrition.org/errata/company/blizzard01.html FreeCraft On June 20, 2003, Blizzard issued a cease and desist letter to the developers of an open source clone of the Warcraft engine called FreeCraft. This hobby project had the same gameplay and characters as Warcraft II, but came with different graphics and music. It was written from scratch and no Blizzard code was used. As well as a similar name, FreeCraft enabled gamers to use Warcraft II graphics, provided they had the Warcraft II CD. The programmers of the clone shut down their site without challenge. Soon after that the developers regrouped to continue the work by the name of Stratagus. Trivia * The phrase "There is no cow level" is a running joke started by the company's game designers stemming from repeated rumors on Battle.net that a "secret cow level" existed in Diablo. The phrase "There is no cow level" was a cheat code in the original StarCraft game. In Diablo II, a cow level was made as a secret level. "There is no cow level" now also appears as a 'tip of the day' on the loading screen of World of Warcraft. * In Blizzard's real-time strategy games (the StarCraft and Warcraft series), clicking on a character repeatedly will invoke humorous sound bites, with some of the most famous including the Orc Grunt's "Stop poking me!" or the Human Footman's "Are you still touching me?". This has been Blizzard's trademark for many years, and continues in Warcraft III the same units said similar things such as "Why are you poking me again?" and "Poke poke poke, is that all you do?", as well as "Me not that kind of Orc!". Many of the humorous phrases came from movies and comics, like the famous "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, "I hate people, but I love gatherings," from Clerks, "This is my boomstick!" from Army of Darkness, or "Spider sense... tingling" from Spider-Man. In some cases, the phrases refer to other Blizzard games, such as the Acolyte in Warcraft III saying "My life for Aiur- er, I mean, Ner'zhul", which is a line taken from StarCraft. Artanis, a unit in StarCraft: Brood War, exclaims "This is not WarCraft in space! It's much more sophisticated!". In World of Warcraft, clicking on a friendly NPC repeatedly will invoke irritated sound bites. Clicking on a Protoss Archon from StarCraft will make it say "I see you have an appetite for destruction", after the Guns and Roses album. Click on the Archon a few more times, and it will say "Welcome to the jungle", a song by Guns and Roses. * In the Warcraft and StarCraft series, clicking on a "critter" repeatedly will eventually make it explode. * The StarCraft cheat "operation cwal" was formed after the group Operation CWAL (Can't Wait Any Longer), who looked forward to StarCraft and did many things to show how much they longed for its release. Blizzard, noticing this group, named this cheat that rapidly increases the rate of unit and structure production after them. Primarily the group wrote fan fiction about special operatives raiding the Blizzard headquarters in order to free the game. * The three founders of the company are UCLA graduates. This is likely the reason why typing in "UCLA" as a cheat code in Warcraft II causes the words "Go Bruins!" to be displayed on the screen. * In World of Warcraft, there are references to Blizzard's game The Lost Vikings in which you may locate "Olaf's All Purpose Shield". Olaf the Stout is one of the three Vikings used in The Lost Vikings in which by using his shield, you were able to glide between two areas that you were not able to jump to previously. In World of Warcraft, "Olaf's All Purpose Shield" is used to slow your fall, allowing characters to explore areas which would normally kill the player upon falling without injury. Also, two in-game items' names form, when read backwards, the name of the game Lost Vikings ("The Shaft of Tsol", "The Amulet of Gni'kiv"). Both items are found in the Uldaman instance, and three NPC dwarves resembling the Lost Vikings stand near the shaft. * If the cheat code "disco" is entered while playing the Beyond the Dark Portal expansion for Warcraft II, a hidden audio track titled "Medieval Man" is played. The song - whose chorus is "I am a medieval man" - is likely a reference to the song "Target", a.k.a. "Mechanical Man" from Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn, which prominently features the line "I am a mechanical man". "Medieval Man" is also a cheat code in StarCraft that immediately grants all upgrades for free. Similarly, in Starcraft: Brood War, entering the cheat code "radio free zerg" will unlock a hidden audio track. Also, in Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, you can also get an audio track by saying "Tenthleveltaurenchieftain." April Fools' Every year on the 1st of April, Blizzard posts creative humorous news on their website as an April Fools' joke. Blizzard's 2007 jokes are currently available at the World of Warcraft site. They include the "Tinfoil Hat," an absurdly long and difficult attunement process for their next dungeon, The Black Temple, and the announcement of a new RTS: "Warcraft: Heroes of Azeroth." The Tinfoil Hat is explained to be an equippable hat to prevent people from seeing items, statistics, or the character in general. The attunement process for The Black Temple is absurdly long, with a few incredibly difficult to achieve requirements at the end. For example, it requires that fifteen bosses from the hardest level of dungeons be killed within ten minutes of each other. The RTS is simply Warcraft III with some changes made to the advertisement text. Also, the four "boxes" available in the picture were obviously taken from Warcraft III with the game name edited on (and horribly so). In 2006, one of their jokes was related to the upcoming World of Warcraft's expansion: The Burning Crusade. Blizzard had not revealed what the new Alliance race would be, and on March 31st, one day early, they posted a news item on the World of Warcraft main page saying that the new race would be the Wisps. (In Warcraft III, Wisps are resource-gatherers for the Night Elves.) Wisps were given the 'Detonate' racial ability that caused them to permanently explode, requiring a new character to be rolled.http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade/townhall/wisps.html The Alliance race was later officially revealed on May 10 at E³ as the Draenei. The other news posted at the same time was that Blizzard planned to open a fast food chain named BurgerCraft, where people could order food and drinks named after Blizzard characters and games.http://www.blizzard.com/press/060401.shtml This news was actually posted on the main page after a joke thread authored by the player Gilgamesh on the Alleria realm was made in their General Forums as a complaint lambasting Blizzards' customer service. Blizzard also posted an absurdly long list of updates to World of Warcraft that would have ruined most characters and gameplay. These fake patch notes included many contradictory changes, one example being "using friendly emotes will now significantly increase the Infernal and Doomguard's chance to remain loyal to the Warlock," with the following entry reading, "Friendly emotes are no longer available to the Warlock." Other April Fool's "give away" updates that were especially comical: *"Additional grass areas have been added to the enemy faction's zones. This grass is exceptionally green." (a reference to the phrase "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.") *"Edwin Vancleef will occasionally shout 'Hey you guys!' as players fight their way through Deadmines." (A reference to the similarities between this dungeon and the movie The Goonies. ) *"New wing added to Scarlet Monastery called the Graveyard! Check it out!" (The Graveyard instance has always existed, however a majority of players do not bother doing it as there are no outstanding benefits of completing it.) A previous April Fools' joke included a new race, Pandaren, supposedly included in a patch for Warcraft III (the Pandaren Brewmaster later became a hireable Hero Class in the game's expansion, due to positive response to the joke). http://www.battle.net/war3/pandaren/ Blizzard also once stated that the two-headed ogre would be a playable race in the upcoming World of Warcraft MMORPG, and that it would require cooperation between two players to control the ogre as each player would only control one head. See also * BlizzCon * Blizzard North * Make Love Not Warcraft References External links Company & Corporate *Blizzard's website *Blizzard UK's website *Battle.Net website The Bnetd case *Blizzard's official statement on battle.net emulators *A rebuttal to Blizzard's official emulation statement *Yale LawMeme's analysis of the case *EFF page on case Category:Video game publishers Category:Video game developers Category:Blizzard Entertainment Category:Irvine, California Category:Entertainment companies Category:United States video game companies Category:Companies based in Orange County, California Category:Companies established in 1991 bg:Blizzard Entertainment ca:Blizzard Entertainment cs:Blizzard Entertainment da:Blizzard Entertainment de:Blizzard Entertainment es:Blizzard Entertainment fr:Blizzard Entertainment ko:블리자드 엔터테인먼트 is:Blizzard Entertainment it:Blizzard Entertainment he:Blizzard Entertainment lb:Blizzard Entertainment lt:Blizzard Entertainment nl:Blizzard Entertainment ja:ブリザード・エンターテインメント no:Blizzard Entertainment nn:Blizzard Entertainment pl:Blizzard Entertainment pt:Blizzard Entertainment ru:Blizzard Entertainment fi:Blizzard Entertainment sv:Blizzard Entertainment tr:Blizzard Entertainment zh:暴雪娛樂